Critics slam ‘militarization’ of police

A Defense Department program that has transferred billions of dollars worth of surplus military equipment to state and local agencies — including Ferguson, Missouri — has come under fire from Attorney General Eric Holder and others given the array of war-zone equipment the police have displayed in confronting protesters.

In one image from Ferguson, St. Louis County police officers in full riot gear point their weapons at an unarmed protester, while in another, a policeman sits atop a heavily armored truck.

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As the fierce standoff between St. Louis County police forces and protesters has escalated in the wake of unarmed 18-year-old Michael Brown’s shooting, the scene has often resembled a war zone. And some are accusing the Pentagon of making it that way.

The reports and images circulated around social media of a small municipality with such costly and high-level equipment has touched off a national debate about the “militarization” of the police, further inflamed passions about what’s happening on the ground in Ferguson, and sparked calls to shut down or trim back the DoD program.

“At a time when we must seek to rebuild trust between law enforcement and the local community, I am deeply concerned that the deployment of military equipment and vehicles sends a conflicting message,” Holder said in a statement Thursday afternoon. The attorney general said the Justice Department could coordinate with local authorities to discuss how police officers could “maintain public safety without relying on unnecessarily extreme displays of force.”

House Armed Services Committee member Duncan Hunter, a Republican, said he didn’t want to end the Pentagon program, but suggested that it needs further restrictions.

“In some cases, military equipment has a practical use. But there are limitations on the type of equipment, obviously,” he California congressman said in an email. “The idea that state and local police departments need tactical vehicles and MRAPs with gun turrets is excessive. Certain resources are designed and manufactured for a military mission—and it should stay that way. I don’t have a problem with the program overall, but I’m not comfortable with the idea that equipment designated for the battlefield could have a community application.”

The Saint Louis County Police Department has received 12 5.56-millimeter rifles, 6 .45 caliber pistols, multiple cargo trailers and utility trucks and night-vision equipment from the Pentagon from 2010-2013, according to an official list from the Missouri Department of Public Safety. It also received its helicopter from the military in 2004.

The Pentagon’s Defense Logistics Agency Law Enforcement Support Office has overseen the D0D 1033 Program since 1995. The program initially began as a way to combat increased crime in U.S. cities and devote more resources to the War on Drugs. But with the drawdown from wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Pentagon has been gifting increasing numbers of high-level weapons to municipalities that critics say have no place in civilian contexts.

The LESO reports on its website that it has transferred $4.3 billion in military equipment to states and local communities, and more than $449 million in 2013 alone. An attached PowerPoint on the webpage shows “Before” and “After” photos for many items, including humvees in military-style camouflage painted over for police use.

Democratic Rep. Hank Johnson of Georgia has announced his intention to introduce the Stop Militarizing Law Enforcement Act, which is aimed at ending the 1033 program. Others have refrained from taking a defined stance on the law, instead calling for greater restraint from the police.

“We need to de-militarize this situation — this kind of response by the police has become the problem instead of the solution,” Missouri Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill said in a statement Thursday. “I obviously respect law enforcement’s work to provide public safety, but my constituents are allowed to have peaceful protests, and the police need to respect that right and protect that right.”

Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, a potential 2016 Republican presidential candidate and major libertarian voice in Congress, called forcefully for police de-militarization, linking the problem to government intrusion. “The images and scenes we continue to see in Ferguson resemble war more than traditional police action,” he wrote in a Thursday op-ed for Time Magazine. He railed against the role of “big government” in creating the problem, railing against the Pentagon program and the Homeland Security Department’s grants to local and state governments.

Ferguson’s reported racial issues have created unease about the program. More than 90 percent of the Ferguson police force is white, despite blacks making up 63 percent of the city’s population. According to official Ferguson police statistics, 86 percent of all stops and 92 percent of all searches in 2013 were of black people. Blacks were also arrested nearly twice as much as whites.

“People in communities of color have born the brunt of militarization of policing for several decades,” said Kara Dansky, of the American Civil Liberties Union, who wrote a 98-page report on police militarization in June. The ACLU is calling for the Pentagon program to be reined in.

“The unnecessary use of paramilitary weapons and tactics puts people in harm’s way,” she added. “It makes communities less safe. It undermines trust in law enforcement. And it undermines individual liberties.”

The website “Veterans on Ferguson” has been launched in recent days, a Storify site with military combat veterans weighing in on the violence. In one aggregated tweet, a veteran shows a picture of a police officer and Ferguson alongside a photo of him when he served in Iraq. “The gentleman on the left has more personal body armor and weaponry than I did while invading Iraq,” he wrote.

Others have said that the military-style equipment is inappropriate in a civilian context, particularly for police officers who are not necessarily equipped to handle such sophisticated weaponry.

“You really have to question the effectiveness of importing military equipment” for people who lack training, said Mieke Eoyang, director of the national security program at the centrist think tank Third Way. She added that military weaponry is designed for “equally-armed adversaries,” not largely peaceful civilian protesters.

Critics note that growing police militarization is not a new phenomenon, but has increased since the creation of the Homeland Security Department after the September 11 attacks.

Police militarization, Glenn Greenwald wrote Thursday, “is the destructive by-product of several decades of deliberate militarization of American policing, a trend that received a sustained (and ongoing) steroid injection in the form of a still-flowing, post-9/11 federal funding bonanza.”